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ASRock CoreHT-252B HTPC Review

Testing:

SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP3:

SiSoft's Sandra 2011 SP3 will be used to run a series of synthetic benchmarks to measure the performance of various system components. The CPU and RAM will have the spotlight with these next benchmarks.

Processor Arithmetic:

The 'Processor Arithmetic' benchmark is up first. This measures the CPU's performance in terms of GIPS and GFLOPS. A higher score is better.

Multi-Core Efficiency:

The 'Multi-Core Efficiency' benchmark measures the available bandwidth between the total amount of cores. This is what allows the cores to communicate and spread workload. More bandwidth and lower latency are better.

Memory Bandwidth:

The 'Memory Bandwidth' benchmark measures the available bandwidth of the installed RAM. Higher bandwidth is better.

Cache and Memory:

'Cache and Memory' measures the bandwidth between the processor's cache and the RAM. Higher bandwidth is better.

Power Management Efficiency:

PME measures the processor's performance in its low-power state to measure how well the processor's low-power functions work when the demand isn't there. A higher score is better and shows how many more times the processor is efficient than at its maximum speed.

Three to six times faster than Intel's Atom still holds. ASRock rounded together some excellent components for their latest HTPC. Of interest is the result of Sandra's 'Power Efficiency' test. As is seen, the Intel Atom is a low power chip to begin with, and so it doesn't gain much from its low power state. This mobile Sandy Bridge chip, however, is 4.4x more efficient when its low power functions are taken advantage of than at full speed. The i5 2520m is a 35 Watt chip, so this should mean that under idle and less demanding settings, the processor will consume down to 7.96 Watts.